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Thursday, October 10, 2013

Israel’s Politics of FragmentationBackground If the politics of deflection exhibit the outward reach of Israel’s grand strategy of territorial expansionism and regional hegemony, the politics of fragmentation serves Israel’s inward
moves designed to weaken Palestinian resistance, induce despair, and de
facto surrender. In fundamental respects deflection is an unwitting
enabler of fragmentation, but it is also its twin or complement.The British were particularly adept in facilitating their
colonial project all over the world by a variety of divide and rule
tactics, which almost everywhere haunted anti-colonial movements,
frequently producing lethal forms of post-colonial partition as in
India, Cyprus, Ireland, Malaya, and of course, Palestine, and deadly
ethnic strife elsewhere as in Nigeria, Kenya, Myanmar, Rwanda. Each of
these national partitions and post-colonial traumas has produced severe
tension and long lasting hostility and struggle, although each takes a
distinctive form due to variations from country to country of power,
vision, geography, resources, history, geopolitics, leadership.An additional British colonial
practice and legacy was embodied in a series of vicious settler
colonial movements that succeeded in effectively eliminating or
marginalizing resistance by indigenous populations as in Australia,
Canada, the United States, and somewhat less so in New Zealand, and
eventually failing politically in South Africa and Namibia, but only
after decades of barbarous racism.

In Palestine the key move was the Balfour Declaration,
which was a colonialist gesture of formal approval given to the Zionist
Project in 1917 tendered at the end of Ottoman rule over Palestine.
This was surely gross interference with the dynamics of Palestinian
self-determination (at the time the estimated Arab population of
Palestine was 747,685, 92.1% of the total, while the Jewish population
was an estimate 58,728, which amounted to 7.9%) and a decisive stimulus
for the Zionist undertaking to achieve supremacy over the land embraced
by the British mandate
to administer Palestine in accordance with a framework agreement with
the League of Nation. The agreement repeated the language of the Balfour
Declaration in its preamble: “Whereas recognition has thereby been
given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.”(emphasis
added) To describe this encouragement of Zionism as merely
‘interference’ is a terribly misleading understatement of the British
role in creating a situation of enduring tension in Palestine, which was
supposedly being administered on the basis of the wellbeing of the
existing indigenous population, what was called “a sacred trust of
civilization” in Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations,
established for the “well-being and development” of peoples ”not yet
able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern
world.” The relevance of the politics of fragmentation refers to a
bundle of practices and overall approach that assumed the form of
inter-ethnic and inter-religious strife during the almost three decades
that the mandate arrangements were in effect.*

At the same time, the British was not the whole story by any
means: the fanatical and effective exploitation of the opportunity to
establish a Jewish homeland of unspecified dimensions manifested the
dedication, skill, and great ambition of the Zionist movement; the lack of comparable sustained and competent resistance by the indigenous population abetted the transformation of historic Palestine; and then these developments were strongly reinforced by the horrors of the Holocaust
and the early complicity of the liberal democracies with Naziism that
led the West to lend its support to the settler colonial reality that
Zionism had become well before the 1948 War. The result was the tragic
combination of statehood and UN membership for Israel and the nakba
involving massive dispossession creating forced refugee and exile for
most Palestinians, and leading after 1967 to occupation, discrimination,
and oppression of those Palestinians who remained either in Israel or
in the 22% of original Palestine.

It should be recalled that the UN solution of 1947, embodied in
GA Resolution 181, after the British gave up their mandatory role was no
more in keeping with the ethos of self-determination than the Balfour
Declaration, decreeing partition and allocating 55% of Palestine to the
Jewish population, 45% to the Palestinians without the slightest effort
to assess the wishes of the population resident in Palestine at the time
or to allocate the land in proportion to the demographic realities at
the time. The UN solution was a new rendition of Western paternalism,
opposed at the time by the Islamic and Middle Eastern members of the UN.
Such a solution was not as overbearing as the mandates system that was
devised to vest quasi-colonial rule in the victorious European powers
after World War I, yet it was still an Orientalist initiative aimed at
the control and exploitation of the destiny of an ethnic, political, and
economic entity long governed by the Ottoman Empire.

The Palestinians (and their Arab neighbors) are often told in
patronizing tones by latter day Zionists and their apologists that the
Palestinians had their chance to become a state, squandered their
opportunity, thereby forfeiting their rights to a state of their own by
rejecting the UN partition plan.
In effect, the Israeli contention is that Palestinians effectively
relinquished their statehood claims by this refusal to accept what the
UN had decreed, while Israel by nominally accepting the UN proposals
validated their sovereign status, which was further confirmed by its
early admission to full membership in the UN. Ever since, Israel has
taken advantage of the fluidity of the legal situation by at once
pretending to accept the UN approach of seeking a compromise by way of
mutual agreement with the Palestinians while doing everything in its
power to prevent such an outcome by projecting its force throughout the
entirety of Palestine, by establishing and expanding settlements, the
ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem, and by advancing an array of maximalist
security claims that have diminished Palestinian prospects. That is,
Israel has publicly endorsed conflict-resolving diplomacy but
operationally has been constantly moving the goal posts by unlawfully
creating facts on the ground, and then successfully insisting on their
acceptance as valid points of departure. In effect, and with American
help, Israel has seemingly given the Palestinians a hard choice, which
is tacitly endorsed by the United States and Europe: accept the
Bantustan destiny we offer or remain forever refugees and victims of
annexation, exile, discrimination, statelessness.

Israel has used its media leverage and geopolitical clout to
create an asymmetric understanding of identity politics as between Jews
and Palestinians. Jews being defined as a people without borders who can
gain Israeli nationality no matter where they live on the planet, while
Palestinians are excluded from Israeli nationality regardless of how
deep their indigenous roots in Palestine itself. This distinction
between the two peoples exhibits the tangible significance of Israel as a
‘Jewish State,’ and why such a designation is morally and legally
unacceptable in the 21st century even as it so zealously claimed by recent Israeli leaders, none more than Benyamin Netanyahu. Modalities of FragmentationThe logic of fragmentation is to weaken, if not destroy, a
political opposition configuration by destroying its unity of purpose
and strategy, and fomenting to the extent possible conflicts between
different tendencies within the adversary movement. It is an evolving
strategy that is interactive, and by its nature becomes an important
theme of conflict. The Palestinians in public constantly stress the
essential role of unity, along with reconciliation to moderate the
relevance of internal differences. In contrast, the Israelis fan the
flames of disunity, stigmatizing elements of the Palestinian reality
that are relevantly submissive, and accept the agenda and frameworks
that are devised by Tel Aviv refusing priorities set by Palestinian
leaders. Over the course of the conflict from 1948 to the present, there
have been ebbs and flows in the course of Palestinian unity, with
maximum unity achieved during the time when Yasir Arafat was the
resistance leader and maximum fragmentation evident since Hamas was
successful in the 2006 Gaza elections, and managed to seize governmental
control from Fatah in Gaza a year later. Another way that Israel has
promoted Palestinian disunity is to favor the so-called moderates
operating under the governance of the Palestinian Authority while
imposing inflicting various punishments on Palestinians adhering to
Hamas.

–Zionism, the Jewish State, and the Palestinian Minority.
Perhaps, the most fundamental form of fragmentation is between Jews and
Palestinians living within the state of Israel. This type of
fragmentation has two principal dimensions: pervasive discrimination
against the 20% Palestinian minority (about 1.5 million) affecting
legal, social, political, cultural, and economic rights, and creating a
Palestinian subjectivity of marginality, subordination, vulnerability.
Although Palestinians in Israel are citizens they are excluded from many
benefits and opportunities because they do not possess Jewish nationality.
Israel may be the only state in the world that privileges nationality
over citizenship in a series of contexts, including family reunification
and access to residence. It is also worth observing that if demographic
projections prove to be reliable Palestinians could be a majority in
Israel as early as 2035, and would almost certainly outnumber Jews in
the country by 2048. Not only does this pose the familiar choice for
Israel between remaining an electoral democracy and retaining its
self-proclaimed Jewish character, but it also shows how hegemonic it is
to insist that the Palestinians and the international community accept
Israel as a Jewish state.

This Palestinian entitlement, validated by the international law
relating to fundamental human rights prohibiting all forms of
discrimination, and especially structural forms embedded in law that
discriminate on the basis of race and religion. The government of
Israel, reinforced by its Supreme Court, endorses the view that only
Jews can possess Israeli nationality that is the basis of a range of
crucial rights under Israeli law. What is more Jews have Israeli
nationality even if lacking any link to Israel and wherever they are
located, while Palestinians (and other religious and ethnic minorities)
are denied Israeli nationality (although given Israeli citizenship) even if indigenous to historic Palestine and to the territory under the sovereign control of the state of Israel.

A secondary form of fragmentation is between this minority in
Israel and the rest of the Palestinian corpus. The dominant
international subjectivity relating to the conflict has so far erased
this minority from its imaginary of peace for the two peoples, or from
any sense that Palestinian human rights in Israel should be
internationally implemented in whatever arrangements are eventually
negotiated or emerges via struggle. As matters now stand, the
Palestinian minority in Israel is unrepresented at the diplomatic level
and lacks any vehicle for the expression of its grievances.

–Occupied Palestine and the Palestinian Diaspora (refugees and enforced exile).
Among the most debilitating forms of fragmentation is the effort by
Israel and its supporters to deny Palestinian refugees and Palestinians
living in the diaspora) their right of return as confirmed by GA
Resolution 184? There are between 4.5 million and 5.5 million
Palestinians who are either refugees or living in the diaspora, as well
as about 1.4 million resident in the West Bank and 1.6 million in Gaza.

The diplomatic discourse has been long shaped by reference to the
two state mantra. This includes the reductive belief that the essence
of a peaceful future for the two peoples depends on working out the
intricacies of ‘land for peace.’ In other words, the dispute is false
categorized as almost exclusively about territory and borders (along with the future of Jerusalem), and not about people.
There is a tacit understanding that seems to include the officials of
the Palestinian Authority to the effect that Palestinians refugee rights
will be ‘handled’ via compensation and the right of return, not to the
place of original dispossession, but to territory eventually placed
under Palestinian sovereignty.

Again the same disparity as between the two sides is encoded in
the diplomacy of ‘the peace process,’ ever more so during the twenty
years shaped by the Oslo framework. The Israel propaganda campaign was
designed to make it appear to be a deal breaker for the Palestinian to
insist on full rights of repatriation as it would allegedly entail the
end of the promise of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Yet such a posture
toward refugees and the Palestinian diaspora cruelly consigns several
million Palestinians to a permanent limbo, in effect repudiating the
idea that the Palestinians are a genuine ‘people’ while absolutizing the
Jews as a people of global scope. Such a dismissal of the claims of
Palestinian refugees also flies in the face of the right of return
specifically affirmed in relation to Palestine by the UN General
Assembly in Resolution 194, and more generally supported by Article 13
of Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The Two Warring Realms of the Occupation of Palestine: the Palestine Authority versus Hamas.
Again Israel and its supporters have been able to drive an ideological
wedge between the Palestinians enduring occupation since 1967. With an
initial effort to discredit the Palestine Liberation Organzation that
had achieved control over a unified and robust Palestine national
movement, Israel actually encouraged the initial emergence of Hamas as a
radical and fragmenting alternative to the PLO when it was founded in
the course of the First Intifada. Israel of course later strongly
repudiated Hamas when it began to carry armed struggle to pre-1967
Israel, most notoriously engaging in suicide bombings in Israel that
involved indiscriminate attacks on civilians, a tactic repudiated in
recent years.

Despite Hamas entering into the political life of occupied
Palestine with American, and winning an internationally supervised
election in 2006, and taking control of Gaza in 2007, it has continued
to be categorized as ‘a terrorist organization’ that is given no
international status. This terrorist designation is also relied upon to
impose a blockade on Gaza that is a flagrant form of collective
punishment in direct violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva
Convention. The Palestine Authority centered in Ramallah has also,
despite occasional rhetoric to the contrary, refused to treat Hamas as a
legitimate governing authority or to allow Hamas to operate as a
legitimate political presence in the West Bank and Jerusalem or to
insist on the inclusion of Hamas in international negotiations
addressing the future of the Palestinian people. This refusal has
persisted despite the more conciliatory tone of Hamas since 2009 when
its leader, Khaled Meshaal, announced a shift in the organization’s
goals: an acceptance of Israel as a state beside Palestine as a state
provided a full withdrawal to 1967 borders and implementation of the
right of return for refugees, and a discontinuation by Hamas of a
movement based on armed struggle. Mashel also gave further reassurances
of moderation by an indication that earlier goals of liberating the
whole of historic Palestine, as proclaimed in its Charter, were a matter
of history that was no longer descriptive of its political program.

In effect, the territorial fragmentation of occupied Palestine is
reinforced by ideological fragmentation, seeking to somewhat
authenticate and privilege the secular and accommodating leadership
provided by the PA while repudiating the Islamic orientation of Hamas.
In this regard, the polarization in such countries as Turkey and Egypt
is cynically reproduced in Palestine as part of Israel’s overall
occupation strategy. This includes a concerted effort by Israel to make
it appear that material living conditions for Palestinians are much
better if the Palestinian leadership cooperates with the Israeli
occupiers than if it continues to rely on a national movement of
liberation and refuses to play the Oslo game.

The Israeli propaganda position on Hamas has emphasized the
rocket attacks on Israel launched from within Gaza. There is much
ambiguity and manipulation of the timeline relating to the rockets in
interaction with various forms of Israeli violent intrusion. We do know
that the casualties during the period of Hamas control of Gaza have been
exceedingly one-sided, with Israel doing most of the killing, and
Palestinians almost all of the dying. We also know that when ceasefires
have been established between Israel and Gaza, there was a good record
of compliance on the Hamas side, and that it was Israel that
provocatively broke the truce, and then launched major military
operations in 2008-09 and 2012 on a defenseless and completely
vulnerable population.

Cantonization and the Separation Wall: Fragmenting the West Bank.
A further Israeli tactic of fragmentation is to make it difficult for
Palestinians to sustain a normal and coherent life. The several hundred
check points throughout the West Bank serious disrupt mobility for the
Palestinians, and make it far easier for Palestinians to avoid delay and
humiliation. It is better for them to remain contained within their
villages, a restrictive life reinforced by periodic closures and curfews
that are extremely disruptive. Vulnerability is accentuated by
nighttime arrests, especially of young male Palestinians, 60% of whom
have been detained in prisons before they reach the age of 25, and the
sense that Israeli violence, whether issuing from the IDF or the
settlers enjoys impunity, and often is jointly carried out.

The Oslo framework not only delegated to the PA the role of
maintaining ‘security’ in Palestinian towns and cities, but bisected the
West Bank into Areas A, B, and C, with Israeli retaining a residual
security right throughout occupied Palestine. Area C, where most of the
settlements are located, is over 60% of the West Bank, and is under
exclusive control of Israel.This fragmentation at the core of the Oslo framework has been a key elementin perpetuating Palestinian misery.

The fragmentation in administration is rigid and discriminatory,
allowing Israeli settlers the benefits of Israel’s rule of law, while
subjecting Palestinians to military administration with extremely
limited rights, and even the denial of a right to enjoy the benefit of
rights. Israel also insists that since it views the West Bank as
disputed territory rather than
‘occupied’ it is not legally obliged to respect international
humanitarian law, including the Geneva Conventions. This fragmentation
between Israeli settlers and Palestinian residents is so severe that it
has been increasingly understood in international circles as a form of
apartheid, which the Rome Statute governing the International Criminal
Court denominates as one type of ‘crime against humanity.’

The Separation Wall is an obvious means
of separating Palestinians from each other and from their land. It was
declared in 2004 to be a violation of international law by a super
majority of 14-1 in the International Court of Justice, but to no avail,
as Israel has defied this near unanimous reading of international law
by the highest judicial body in the UN, and yet suffered no adverse
consequences. In some West Bank communities Palestinians are surrounded
by the wall and in others Palestinian farmers can only gain access to
and from their land at appointed times when wall gates are opened.

Fragmentation and Self-DeterminationThe pervasiveness of fragmentation is one reason why there is so
little belief that the recently revived peace process is anything more
than one more turn of the wheel, allowing Israel to proceed with its
policies designed to take as much of what remains of Palestine as it
wants so as to realize its own conception of Jewish self-determination.
Just as Israel refuses to restrict the Jewish right of return, so it
also refuses to delimit its boundaries. When it negotiates
internationally it insists on even more prerogatives under the banner of
security and anti-terrorism. Israel approach such negotiations as a
zero-sum dynamic of gain for itself, loss for Palestine, a process
hidden from view by the politics of deflection and undermining the
Palestinian capacity for coherent resistance by the politics of
fragmentation.

*
There are two issues posed, beyond the scope of this post, that bear on
Palestinian self-determination emanating from the Balfour Declaration
and the ensuing British mandatory role in Palestine: (1) to what extent
does “a national home for the Jewish people” imply a valid right of
self-determination, as implemented by the establishment of the state of
Israel? Does the idea of ‘a national home’ encompass statehood? (2) to
what extent does the colonialist nature of the Balfour Declaration and
the League mandate system invalidate any actions taken?

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